Standard math disclaimer

I feel the need to provide a disclaimer for my math. I reserve the right to be many orders of magnitude off. Numbers herein shall be considered approximate or a suggestion, rather than, you know, truth.

With that, here's some more.

Al, Sagan may have told you the atmosphere is a "tiny, tiny layer" on the planet, but let's remember the planet is enormous: 1,083,273,000,000 cubic kilometers (This seemed large to me at first — a trillion cubic km? It's a lot easier to say 'ten to the twelve'! — but volume is inherently a much bigger number than length; the milky way has a volume of 533,333,333,330,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic light years!). The atmosphere has a volume of 76,509,840,000 km³ (this is obviously back-of-envelope), but of course it's not a uniform distribution of mass. At any rate, that's twelve km³ for every single person on the planet. Just think, if you filled just one of those 12-km³ parcels with goat semen, you could drown every single one of those vile doubletalking politician-cum-activist (no pun intended, mind) on Earth in the appropriate fashion. Sagan's right, it's a lot smaller than Earth (being about 7% of the total volume, and substantially less mass), but it's still really fuckin' huge.

In other news, I found this bit of humor in Math::Complex:

sub _rootbad {
  my $mess = "Root $_[0] illegal, root rank must be positive integer.\n";

  my @up = caller(1);

  $mess .= "Died at $up[1] line $up[2].\n";

  die $mess;
}

Bad root! No shell for you!

Just can't do it.

Limits is going to have to wait. Everything I've been trying to do to dislodge the second book from my head (inundating myself with tons of other genre fiction) has served only to fill my head with ideas for the second book. I have to draw up a timeline and character sketches. Add those to the outline and I should be able to actually put some substantial effort into the book.

On the one hand, I'm kind of bummed because I am so close to being done with Limits. But by not writing #2, I am stifling that book in addition to Limits. That's not what I intended to do when I told myself to stop writing and think for a while.

I find people in the strangest of places. Er, fictional people that is.

... I was disappointed to learn today of the demise of Saparmurat Niyazov, President for Life of Turkenistan, aka Turkmenbashi; a supremely eccentric dictator whose weirdness was of the first water. Doubtless he was a most unpleasant fellow whose demise will be welcomed by many: but his life and personality was a vein of rich ore that I mined ruthlessly whenever I needed to come up with science fictional villains.

I'm in the research phase that comes after the "ah hah" moment. I find it kinda funny how things get twisted from what I initially envisioned to what "works." I find it kind of sad, I guess, that I came up with an idea of what I wanted, and considered it, you know, totally outlandish (hence making it by definition fiction) at the time. Inevitably these outlandish ideas wind up having strong, strong roots in the present. Consider the case of methane hydrates. Let's say for a moment that you don't necessarily believe global warming is going to heat the seabed up enough (say, to 9-10°C). The catch here is that it isn't the entire body of water on the planet that needs to be warmed, it's just a few localized areas. There are a couple places you'd need to do that to have the "big burp." The first of course is the seafloor. The problem with the seafloor is that it has this enormous heat sink: the ocean. So even if you had some way to heat up the seafloor, you'd have to pour so much energy into it as to be difficult to reasonably explained. The second is a little easier: permafrost. There are a million and five ways to heat up the permafrost a few degrees, because the atmosphere is nowhere near as good a heatsink as the oceans are. There are a couple of nuclear options, such as war and fallout (e.g., Chernobyl or a fast breeder reactor). A few chemical options that don't involve CO2 (lithium, fluorine). A few direct cases of human intervention (housing, mining). So let's try that:

Gary shivered as he looked out across the harbor of Tiksi. Bits of ice, ranging in size from Cryptovolans and Diplodocus to Nimitz, Kiev and still larger bergs, sat quiescent in the water. The stench of fluorine blew seaward, and he quickly reached to cover his nose. He looked over his shoulder at ад на земле — hell on earth. The Russians weren't big on subtlety. Columns of soot and fluorohalocarbons rose out of the reactor, a kahlua-banana schnapps pallor coalescing overhead.

The unappetizing cocktail of the coal-fluorine reaction had one benefit: there was little carbon dioxide emitted. The drawback of course, being fluorine itself was more harmful than CO2, incredibly difficult to handle, and generated terrific waste heat. Flourine-Coal reactors were but one arrow in the quiver of Russian ways to circumvent the Kyoto Protocol, who preferred to dodge the restrictions rather than barter on the global carbon dioxide futures market. And who would stop them? The permafrost had loosened up sufficiently that huge tracts of housing could be built as far north as the Ostrovs, creating beach-front property on the Kara Sea. Enormous power was generated in reactors largely sequestered in Siberia, new homes were being built, and the citizens were happy under the yellowish sky, tending to the muck that was their front yard. It beat Moscow.

I've got to get the fuck out of this place, thought Gary.

It's really not especially hard to define an idea, in this case that auto emissions and deforestation are a significant cause of global warming, and support it with a plausible argument which is not the expected one. In this case, we would expect the explosion of growth in sub-Asia and Africa leading to yet more emissions. However, Kyoto itself is the reason global warming has accelerated: it's much cheaper to cheat and circumvent it than it is to comply with it or trade emissions options. At least in the above excerpt.

Anyways, I find myself having little trouble supporting the notions behind some of the important features in the book. The problem is getting the facts straight and in the right order, and creating characters who are not just believable, but actually likable. Because nobody's going to read a book with Velma sussing out the causes of global warming. It's substantially more interesting to have Gary Ames, nerdcore rapper par excellence traipsing about, bitching about the weather while blithely ignoring obvious causes. I wouldn't be against him having a torrid love affair with Velma, however. That is interesting. Geeks in love, am I right?

So, Limits, book 1, is tabled for the second time in four months, this time rather close to actually being finished. Book 2, presently with no real title (tentatively Foreigners until I can find something better, I don't need to start a plural-noun trend), is finally getting the attention it deserves. And, really, I'm enjoying it.

Microsoft Windows on a supercomputer?!

Dear Brad, Kyril, and Lance,

I told you so. Next time listen to your engineers.

Love,
alex

ps., yes, I still have the email I sent you all about this. in 2005.

(I wonder if Strensky had anything to do with this)

Ribs.

So, people at the coffee place asked me for the recipe. People at Sandy's office asked me for it. People at my work have asked me. My parents have both asked me, the sister too. Well, here's the story. I don't actually like ribs. I'm kind of picky about my fingers getting sticky, so eating ribs is hard (although I do try to get along with a fork). Sandy had been talking about ribs, a number of years ago; living in an apartment building means usually somebody else is cooking, and barbecue is just something that happens in the South (yes, we are south of the Mason-Dixon line). I'm generally an experimenter as cooking goes. Usually new things (Indian, Thai, Chinese, Afghani, etc) are the most interesting, typically requiring an investment in new sorts of spices and ingredients ("they came for the hot stuff"). In the case of barbecue, I hadn't ever done anything other than squirt somebody else's sauce on whatever was to be barbecued. Furthermore, since I had stopped slathering anything on meat I was grilling, I hadn't used barbecue sauce since, oh, adolescence. Typically, steaks get a little coriander, white pepper, black pepper, and sel gris.

And then we got a copy of Chiarello's Casual Cooking as a gift. As above, I'm not especially into Italian, either, which is sort of Chiarello's forte. However, there's a recipe for ribs therein which was interesting in that it looked good, was more or less uncomplicated, and combined ingredients I wouldn't have normally expected to see together. It was similar to:

• 1c espresso
• 2c ketchup
• 2T soy sauce
• 1c honey
• browned garlic

Simply combine, stir, and put on the ribs. Cook them in the oven (not in the grill), re-basting and turning every 45 minutes or so for four hours. Then, when you want to serve them, 425° for fifteen minutes. The good thing about this approach is that you can put them in the fridge prior to the last bit. Chiarello says this makes them great for parties, stuff to serve before a meal, etc. Since very little preparation involved.

So I like the approach. But I'm also a lazyass when it comes to cooking by directions. So I read the recipe once or twice, and since then have been doing it by hand, and ingredients and processes have changed. This is more or less what we've arrived at. Bear in mind that a lot of it is per taste. Don't use habaneros if you don't like spicy. Use a lighter coffee instead of an espresso if you want less of that in it. Use molasses and white sugar instead of honey if you prefer a more even taste. I change the recipe based upon my mood at the time of cooking.

Usually we wind up with 3-4 full racks of pork ribs. I haven't tried beef.

• 1c tomato paste
• 1c (8 floz, not one serving) espresso (darker is better)
• 1c honey (darker is better)
• 2T soy sauce
• 1c white sugar (perhaps more, perhaps less)
• 2 heaping tablespoons Sierra Nevada mustard (the smooth one, but this is your call too)
• 1T ground coriander
• 2T ground ginger (not fresh! not pickled!)
• .5T granulated garlic (you can use fresh here, but brown it; I'm just being lazy)
• 1t salt (whichever you like)
• 1/2c vinegar (I prefer a cabernet sauvignon vinegar; light isn't appropriate here, the idea is a full bodied vinegar)
• 1/2c Melinda's XXX (again, personal preference; omit, change with less spicy, etc)
  

Now, you can add an oil, like butter or olive oil, if you want the meat to be a little greasier/moister. Bear in mind the finished product will be veritably falling off the bone. Also, Chiarello uses sel gris on the meat, just sprinkled or rubbed on. This is a matter of preference. Sandy is not so crazy about salt, I'm pretty pro-salt. The major change is of course the removal of the ketchup. There's an amazing degree of variances in ketchup, so if you use a different brand you'll probably wind up with a drastically different taste. Starting with tomatoes and working your way up is a good way to ensure a little better consistency. Bear in mind also, we're kind of ingredient fascists, and so we obtained all the above from Whole Foods. So that's organic tomato paste, organic pork, and the spices are fresh rather than having sat in your cupboard for three years. I'm not sure you could find a Cab vinegar at Safeway, but I wouldn't recommend it in any case. So your mileage may vary here with respect to the taste/quality of the food (key takeaway here: your food is only as good as your ingredients).

You're going to put all that in a non-stick (do not use a steel like demeyere or all-clad here) pot, probably 2qt sized. Start with the honey, vinegar, tomato paste, and espresso. Everything else goes in when that emulsifies. Again, incrementally, to taste. But I think those above are pretty good bounds. Use cookie sheets. You'll want to put foil down on them because the sauce is a terrific mess. Cook at 325° for thirty minutes. Re-slather, reduce heat to 275°, turn over. At this point, turn over the ribs every 30-45 minutes, re-slathering them each time. The goal is to get to about 3 hours here, but you could go as long as 4, and you might be able to get away with 2.5 if you turned the heat up to 300 or 325 (length of cooking at lower temperatures meaning more moist).

Then of course, you put a light coating (note I did not say 'slather'), and toss em in there for ten or fifteen minutes at 425°. The notion being, of course, to put a glaze on them.

You'll want to then take them out of the oven, cut them into individual pieces, and then serve them in bowls or large plates. Consideration to be taken for the huge number of bones to pile up after serving, so bowls is probably best. As are wet-naps. Obviously the typical barbecue vegetables go well here. I actually prefer a lighter beer than normal with barbecue, like an IPA or even hooch. Wine? Are you kidding? It's ribs for crying out loud! You don't drink wine with ribs, even if you're Michael Chiarello.

The benefit of cooking on a grill is the goo falling off the meat winds up in the grill, not all over your kitchen. So this is going to create a giant mess in your kitchen. But remember, you got into this because you didn't mind having caramelized sugared tomato paste on your fingers. Enjoy.

Where have you been all my life?

I suppose telling George Romero to, uh, eat his heart out would be silly. But, please do eet.

Coffee or GTFO

Hadn't had a coffee from Papua New Guinea until today. Murky Coffee had PNG's Red Mountain today when I went to pick up espresso for the ribs I'm making. The 3cups review is pretty much spot-on. It's an incredible coffee. Very balanced and light, while still having a very full body to it. It's got almost no bitterness to it, and the taste just keeps going (a lot like a really nice Speyside will do, which is curious). Note that I've had the Blue Mountain from Jamaica quite a few times over the years, and I've had (genuine, as in not Hilo Hattie's) Kona as well (on Hawai‘i, Maui, and O‘ahu no less). I'm not sure what exactly typifies an "island coffee" per the review, but I'd certainly have a hard time picking between the Red Mountain and Kona. Blue Mountain is a nice coffee, but it's a little too fruity and sweet for my tastes.

... this is the best example of an island coffee I have tasted in a long, long time. The classic Waghi Valley ginger overtone is here, along with a gentle cherrylike fruitiness and notes of vanilla, brown sugar, and spice.

still no news.

you know that feeling

When you really want to know the answer, but you're terrified of it? Yeah, it's like that.

house hunting

So it's not in Taiwan (link to Google Earth kmz). But, it's got an unbeatable view. It just happened that as we went out to have a look at the place, it began to snow. So we got pictures with and without the snow, and had the joy of driving the Subaru up and down a mountain, on gravel and dirt roads, in the snow. Glee. Many more pictures, probably won't post them publicly as we obviously haven't bid on the house. But boy do I wanna. Yum.

The Oceanaire

But we knew that already.

missing the point and liking it!

The Guardian has published an excerpt of a book on the future of China. It's kind of interesting in that it starts

The emergence of China as a $2 trillion economy from such inauspicious beginnings only 25 years ago is such a giddy accomplishment that the temptation to see its success as proof positive of your own prejudices is overwhelming. And the west's broad prejudice is that China is growing so rapidly because it has abandoned communism and embraced capitalism.

And yet it goes on to state, one paragraph later:

in China, its so-called capitalism looks nothing like any form of capitalism the west has known and the transition from communism remains fundamentally problematic. The alpha and omega of China's political economy is that the Communist party remains firmly in the driving seat not just of government, but of the economy - a control that goes into the very marrow of how ownership rights are conceived and business strategies devised.

The author seems to be missing the point. While the West seems to see (or perhaps, desperately wants to see) China as proof that communism must fail, giving way to western capitalism, the author indicates for us that China is actually just pretending to be capitalist. What's really under the covers is

... one of the most corrupt organisations the world has ever witnessed. The combination of absolute power and an ideology that palpably no longer describes reality is a virus that is morally and psychologically undermining the regime.

...

Corruption has become part of the system's DNA, now threatening the integrity of the state.

Mr. Hutton goes to great lengths to describe the corruption in China, and the harm it can do to its people (not least of which, apparently, is the suicide of corrupt officials). In fact, he concludes that

Successful businesses have to be successful in business terms - with managers freely exploiting opportunities, developing products and brands and promoting on ability. No such autonomy is possible within Leninist corporatism; party needs come before those of business, enforced by a national system of party committees in every enterprise, finance from state-owned banks and a complex system of accounting and ownership rights that leaves majority ownership of most enterprises with the state. Private shareholders have very limited ownership rights; companies' fixed assets are separated out in company accounts and can still only be legally owned by state and public bodies.

This is to say, capitalism and progress cannot exist in a system which is, by definition, anathema to Western Capitalism. It seems to me that Hutton has forgotten one of the most important tenets of capitalism: Capital.

Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are mostly privately or corporately owned and operated for profit and in which distribution, production and pricing of goods and services are determined in a largely free market.

(via) If we look at the above definition, offered by those most astute of economists, we can see the primary focus of capitalism is not the corporate or private ownership of "distribution, production, and pricing," but rather is the fact that they are operated for profit in a free market. Let us also remember (because there are a few of you screeching at me, I can hear you) that Mr. Hutton and wikipedia are subject to the systemic bias that many of us are subject to:

1. Male
2. Technically inclined
3. Formally educated
4. English-speaking
5. White
6. Aged 15-49
7. From a predominantly Christian country
8. From an industrialized nation
   
9. From the Northern Hemisphere
10. More likely to be employed in intellectual pursuits than in practical skills or physical labor

leading to the presumption that any form of capitalism is likely to be based upon the above ten biases. A profit-driven economy, in a free market

A free market is a market where the price of each item or service is arranged by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers (see supply and demand); the opposite is a controlled market, where supply and price are set by a government.^[1] However, while a free market necessitates that government does not dictate prices, it also requires the traders themselves do not coerce or defraud each other, so that all trades are morally voluntary.^[2]

need not have prices set by consumers, or by citizens (with a nod to Solzhenitsyn). Rather the prices need to be set by the market itself, by the consumers of goods. In the case of the Chinese state-owned capitalist economy, the prices are still set by the consumers, as the government is not — cannot — force people to buy goods. Rather, the Chinese are simply setting prices much the same way they fix the value of their currency. This isn't as sinister as it sounds (although, as somebody who lives in the west, I can say that it does indeed sound sinister; please however remember your and my bias here). All those corrupt officials have one thing in mind: profit. Even if it means they're corrupt to the core, and they're ordering mafiaesque killings and scams, if they are so corrupt as to prove the market untenable, the whole thing collapses on their heads.

We don't need to look any further than Singapore or Viet Nam to see that these sorts of markets actually do work, can and do succeed, and will continue to for quite some time. It may be helpful to think of this system as "capitalism by the few" rather than the western "capitalism of the many" (note distinction of by/of). Even in the west, it isn't clear that the entire society dictates the prices of goods, or the valuation of currency, or labor standards. One can simply examine the economy of Europe (and things like socialized medicine, state-provided narcotics — the value of methadone being substantially higher in a truly consumer-controlled market — and so on), as well as in the United States, where we have a great many (although fewer than many places in the world) socialized programs and products. Corn, for example.

I'd be interested in reading Mr. Kamm's opinion of the book. I suspect it will eventually come across his desk.

There are a couple salient points in the excerpt, the first being

According to one influential estimate, even the tiniest upward movement in interest rates or the slightest decline in sales would mean that 40%-60% of their enormous bank debts would not be serviced, rendering the entire Chinese banking system bankrupt. They are commercial and business disaster areas.

The problem with this argument, however, is that debt is part of any healthy economy. It is helpful to consider the question of American homeowners. One of the typical arguments of armchair financial planners is that the best investment one can make is their home. It's generally the most expensive thing anyone buys. Let us say that tomorrow, I purchase a home, and find myself suddenly in US$1.5M of debt. This is an enormous figure. However, what this ensures is that I will continue to work to pay it off, and my buying it ensures that the people who built the house will be paid for their work. Additionally, there are more nuanced factors, such as my investing elsewhere to hedge bets against a flagging housing market. The point is that debt is not as unhealthy as the author makes it out to be. Consider also, the debt of America as a country, or of its people. I won't pretend I remember the numbers from the last Marketplace, but I do certainly remember American consumer debt is in the many trillions of dollars. Americans will be paying this off in perpetuity, as debts are paid, and new debts are created. Importantly, without debt, there is no payment.

Again, also consider that it is not in the interest of the corrupt state officials to bankrupt their own economy. It is always in the interest of those involved in Capitalism — whatever the strain — to perpetuate the system in order to further increase their profits. In a static system, where prices are fixed not by the consumer, but by Leninist or Marxist ideals (not the case here, certainly), there is no incentive to keep the system working, as there is no way to increase wealth past a certain point. The promise of free-market capitalism is perpetual wealth gain through reinvestment.

The second interesting point in the excerpt is thus:

The cumulative result of all this is economic weakness, despite the eye-catching growth figures. Innovation is poor; half of China's patents come from foreign companies. Its growth depends on huge investment, representing an unsustainable 40% or more of GDP financed by peasant savings. But China now needs $5.4 of extra investment to produce an extra $1 of output, a proportion vastly higher than that in economies such as Britain or the US. But 20 years ago, China needed just $4 to deliver the same result. In other words, an already gravely inefficient economy has become even more inefficient. China's national accounts tell the same story. Hu Angang calculates that China is now back to the Mao years in term of the inefficiency with which it uses capital to generate growth.

which indeed offers actual numbers to demonstrate the health of the Chinese economy. Note that they are numbers relative to the west, which is a meaningless comparison here. All the same, it is worthwhile to note that the trend has changed. It's really too bad that Hutton continues with

Behind all these problems lie Leninist corporatism. Capitalism, I contend, is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices which China's reforms have permitted. It is a system in which many different actors freely take different decisions according to their best judgment; some are right and some are wrong, but the system never has to bet on any one being right for everyone - as in an authoritarian system of centralised economic control.

(emphasis mine). There's a tenet in the "so you're new to investing" school

Investing and religion don’t mix
Amana aside, all of these funds are mediocre performers, at best. That could be reversed at MMA Praxis, because last year’s Morningstar equity-fund managers-of-the-year, Christopher Davis and Kenneth Feinberg, were hired in January to take over the Core Stock fund.

But it’s unlikely that dynamic duo will be able to achieve the kind of greatness they enjoy at their economic-inspired mutual funds, Davis New York Venture A (NYVTX) and Selected American Shares S (SLASX).

You may substitute "religion" here for "morals," "politics," and any other subjective razor you'd like (counterpoint). The point is, if you're going to objectively value something so as to invest (or not) in it, you cannot view it through a lens of what your beliefs are (although here, one could make equivocal arguments that it is either theosophist or capitalist to do so). Mr. Hutton in this case, has done precisely the latter. He has tried and convicted the Chinese economic model in a court of his — not their — views. They may well succeed, continue to grow, in their own particular corrupt fashion, and maybe even step on the little guy in their path to do that. It doesn't mean they won't succeed. They're just going to do it in such a way that causes him to jump up and down, simian-fashion, screeching about how unfair and unjust the world is to conscientious, righteous investors such as himself.

The west is unforgivably ignorant about China's shortcomings and weaknesses, which leads it vastly to exaggerate the extent of the Chinese "threat".

See also: irony.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

(there's some un-work-safe-ness towards the bottom of this entry, but it's pretty small and only a dick would think it was a firing offense)

I really want to finish Limits, but it seems I can't get the next book out of my head (I've tried, and tried, and tried, but it keeps giving me this sort of mental indigestion, where I can't seem to kick its ass back into the small intestine of my superior temporal gyrus for processing later). It's literally keeping me up at night. So tonight, I sat down to start the outline. It had to be done sooner or later, I might as well get that started, I guess. I know it's going to distract me from Limits, but it's doing that already.

For a little bit of context, I generally have all my writing stashed in a single hierarchy in my "directory of stuff to not throw out, and to probably keep backed up." It would look something like:

DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title.doc
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title-$branchnum.doc (usually a few)
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title-Outline.doc
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/notes
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/concept
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/@stuff_generally_research_related

So I already had the notes and concept put together (where 'notes' is stuff I think is interesting to the topic, and 'concept' is the 'ah hah' moment that I got, inspiring me to, you know, write a book). In the grand scheme of 'how complete' this book is, I have nine $title directories (all of which, by definition, have a 'concept' file), of which four have a 'notes' file, three have an outline, and two have an outline and manuscript. This particular book, while I've been trying very hard not to write it, is one of the outline/manuscript/notes/concept/research conglomerates. That is to say, it's the second most complete pile I've got. It's got about three megs of stuff in it, as compared to Limits' eight megs (doesn't sound like a lot, but consider this is text).

I guess this means it really, really wants to get written. So, as I took my war-mongering contemporary fiction hat off, and replaced it with the Neuromancer hat of cyberpunkish science fiction (note: I'm not writing Neuromancer, but it helps to consider the difference between, say, Clancy and Gibson), I began fleshing out the outline, I also traipsed through my notes and the concept, seeing what I had left for myself. It turns out this is going to be a hard book to write. In many ways, it's going to be a lot harder to write than Limits was (is). It's got significant portions of three languages (only one of which uses a roman character set) — in addition to English — in it. It uses, necessarily, a lot of meme-ish type stuff (which clearly gave Charlie pause in Accelerando). It also requires a little more imagination. I'm not going to go into the particulars of it, but let's say that it's a lot easier to predict where things are in Limits' timeframe than they are in this book. And, this book (no real working title, but I'm toying with Foreigners) has a lot more intimate connection with the characters (in Limits, they're more a part of the story, rather than the story themselves). I'm also having a hard time reconciling a lot of the ... familiar tone required for the book with the need to have it not come across as a 7th grade report on 4chan. But then how does one discuss futanari seriously?

Sometimes I hate it when I set out to challenge myself. Seems to me that I'd be bored if I wasn't trying to do literary backflips, but it would be a lot easier to write books about...

Ashore, Commander Wolfson faces his own death. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he realizes his life is in shambles. Health gone, marriage a facade, and career now tarnished by the sinking of the USS Manhattan.

Commander Wolfson fights to raise the sub and learn why she sank. The incident was blamed on a faulty seal, but new evidence points towards sabotage.

Aboard the sub, Noah listens intently to the stories of each of his fellow travelers. He uncovers evidence that one sailor might be the enemy within. A suicide bomber, using a nuclear submarine as his delivery vessel.

(via). For those who haven't already read about the Kursk are invited to do so.

In other news, I think I've finally unfucked all those broken tags I created ages ago. Apologies for the CC reference.

Economics in SFF

NPR has a not-quite-interesting piece on the role of economics in contemporary science fiction and fantasy. They speculate that some of this came out of the dot com era (referring to Charlie as a programmer, rather than, say, pharmacist), and that it's only natural for the genre to branch out into new territory. This is, of course, the problem that modern literary criticism (in the classical sense of the word, not as in 'derision') has with contemporary science fiction (or indeed contemporary fiction) in general. As human knowledge increases in depth and breadth, writing which is necessarily cross-genre emerges. To insist that a piece of fiction is 'breaking out of' traditional genres (such as 'science fiction' or 'period piece') is to refuse to recognize that a sort of renaissance has occurred in modern writing. I find myself wondering when people (critics in specific; the authors don't seem to have any difficulty with straddling multiple traditional genres) will just get the clue, and realize that fiction is just that: fiction. There's no need to classify fiction as foofiction or barfiction. Why not just refer to it as fiction?

Perhaps because people are too attached to having a sort of semantic filter for incoming data? Please, for jebus' sake, identify that fiction so I don't have to read any of it to know what it is! I might be tainted by reading some science fiction when I was looking for a book on economics!

Chinese vs. Computers

It has been more than six years since Mr. Li started using a computer for Chinese word processing. It has been just under six years since the characters started slipping away. He estimates that more than 95 percent of his writing is now done by computer.

''I can go for a month without picking up a pen,'' Mr. Li said.

Among Chinese speakers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of computers for word processing is mounting a slow but steady assault on their ability to write characters by hand. Many Chinese say that could undermine the written language.

Why would you still spend so much time on handwriting Chinese characters when you are eventually going to use computers?